ArcInfo Workstation used to be a great way to run Esri/ArcGIS geoprocessing tasks on *nix boxes. However, it seems the last version of ArcInfo Workstation that ran on Linux was 9.1. I’d contacted Esri about obtaining a copy of 9.1, but apparently it is out of production and they do not have any copies of the software that they’d be able to send to me.

So basically the workstation/desktop route is out not available at this time. But there is more than one way to skin a cat: ArcGIS Server 10 (AGS) runs on Linux.

Taking a different tack, AGS exposes the geoprocessing object through a Python wrappers. That means that we should be able to programatically run our software on Linux through Python. Python also has wrappers or libraries for multithreading and MPI (distributed), so the implications for taking advantage of our cluster are especially exciting.

Note: There are some differences to be expected, such as with file path conventions and name lengths.